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Tech Report kmi-07-01 Abstract


Symmetrical support in FlashMeeting: a naturalistic study of live online peer-to-peer learning via software videoconferencing
Techreport ID: kmi-07-01
Date: 2007
Author(s): Peter Scott, Linda Castaņeda, Kevin Quick, Jon Linney
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This paper reports on a naturalistic study of peer-to-peer learning, in a live, online-video meeting context. Over a 6-month period a group of international students of animation attended 99 live, online study group events amounting to around 120 hours of live broadcast meeting time. Some meetings were very large, with up to 34 participants, but the average participation was 10 students. These events were entirely self-organized, policed and managed by the student community. Some students emerged as natural mentors, and the group exhibited substantial supportive, mutually facilitative roles. This longitudinal study provides concrete measures of the impact of simple, live videoconferencing in an online learning context. The study also shows that learners can provide symmetrical support for each other in a live non-formal, peer-learning context, even without a formal scaffold of lectures and seminars.

Publication(s):

Submitted to Computers and Education, October 2006
 
KMi Publications Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities